Not yet a butterfly.

A while back, I wrote a review for Resident Evil 2’s remake, and I gave it five stars. Part of the justification I gave at the time was that I couldn’t think of “anything that I disliked about it”, and I’m beginning to suspect that may have been the wrong way of looking at it. Not only does it frame the praise in a pretty backhanded way, but it’s not wholly accurate to why it got the score that it did, either. To be fair to myself, I knew at the time that it was an oversimplification that I wrote down purely for the sake of having something snappy to say about the game, but it’s games like Cocoon that make me rethink taking that position. Like Resident Evil 2, I can’t think of anything I disliked about Cocoon. Why, then, does the former get five stars, and the latter get three?

Unrealized potential.

There are a lot of pieces of art and a lot of places and a lot of people out there in the world which aren’t unlikable, but they aren’t especially likeable, either. It’s not enough to not have anything that’s unlikable about you. You need to have something more that draws people in and keeps them there. For some, I imagine the art direction of Cocoon alone is going to be enough to fill in the gaps of the weak puzzle design and a premature ending — it almost was, for me — and that’s good. But I’m left wanting for more in a way that didn’t satisfy me, because Cocoon's got a lot of promise that it can't quite deliver on.

The core gimmick of hopping between universes has been done dozens of times before, but Cocoon stands out in how seamless the transitions are. There’s a very, very lengthy pre-load when you first boot the game up as it assembles all of the assets, and this allows you to completely avoid loading screens; whatever loading is going on after you start the game is completely unnoticeable, which is a definite achievement for something that looks this visually impressive. The game has an immensely strong identity, with all of its insect-like machines and swelling synth arpeggios; equally impressive is the paring down of the control scheme to a single analog stick and one button. You would expect your verbs to be fairly limited when you've only got a single button for interacting with the world, but it allows you to carry orbs, drag objects, run through motion sensors, activate platforms, teleport to different worlds, control grub-like drones, and shoot energy blasts. There are a lot of moving parts to keep track of, and that suggests there's going to be some very in-depth puzzle design.

What’s unfortunate, then, is how all of these actions being contextual means that you’ll very rarely be using them in tandem with one another to solve problems. Most of the puzzles are little more than identifying which orb you need to be carrying at a given time, carrying that orb until the puzzle is solved, and then swapping out for a different orb as needed until you can progress to the next area. The dimension-hopping aspect itself actually ends up taking something of a backseat as you move further and further through the game; progressing through each of the orb’s sub-worlds will eventually place you in a spot that you can’t get out of, locking you to a single screen within that orb. The red orb that you start the game with, for example, will leave you stuck in about thirty square feet of space you can walk around in for the last hour of the game, meaning that it devolves into only being usable as a sort of backpack to store other orbs inside of. The white orb’s world similarly gets pared down to purely being a place to store the red orb inside of, and the purple orb’s world might actually just be one or two screens. Even the final puzzle of the game that requires you to nest all of the orbs inside one another in a specific order is painfully easy due to how linear of a solution it is, reflecting a lot of the other puzzles in the game; the hardest part of most of these is when you know what you need to do, but it’ll take you a couple minutes to walk around setting it all up.

I've struggled with the rest of this review because I walked away from writing for a few days, and now that I'm back at it, I barely remember anything about Cocoon. There are these vague vignette flashes, where I can recall a setpiece or two — the tennis match against the big orb guardian, the drone puzzles — but the rest of these color-coded worlds bleed into one another as a brown-grey muck. What I definitely didn't expect out of Cocoon was for as much of it to be as forgettable as it ultimately feels, but I doubt I'll be able to recall much of anything about it by this time next week. With the puzzles being as linear as they are, the game relies heavily on being a sightseeing tour, and it feels sort of like I drove straight through it. It's the type of game that I want to like a lot more than I actually do. What's here could have been a lot more impressive than it is, but it isn't, and that makes it hurt worse than if it had no potential at all.

You can't only do nothing wrong.

No Man's Sky and its defenders have collectively cast acid on games discourse and left it in a state of permanent disrepair.

Whenever a new game comes out, and it inevitably launches broken, and feature-incomplete, and abjectly unfun, the same argument gets trotted out by those eager to defend their newest, shiniest toy: "Well, No Man's Sky had a bad launch too, and now it's great!" It's become something of a thought-terminating cliche; sure, the game in question is bad now, but this other game was also bad once, so don't worry too much about it. It's a defeatist attitude that's only ever put forward by people who have been conditioned to be complacent. It's the rallying cry of those who take pride in mediocrity. Don't complain about this new game being a buggy, unfinished piece of shit, because that's what No Man's Sky once was, and you're gonna look real foolish when the developers of the new game make it acceptable.

While this applies less often to those on Backloggd (and you will thus think I'm talking out of my ass if you've been incubated on and subsequently limited yourself exclusively to this site), using No Man's Sky as a shield against criticism is the common consumer-brained man's way of ensuring that nobody ever has a critical thought about something that sucks. It's astonishing how many people treat having quality standards as some sort of sin. You'll see it everywhere on Reddit, in the YouTube comments, on the Steam forums; waves and waves of people who will come to the absolute defense of whatever product they've recently gotten fixated on, always bringing up No Man's Sky as abject proof that one ought not complain about something coming out and being bad. After all, if it's good later, you don't want to be the dumbass naysayer who gets proven wrong by the scrappy little company who rode the wave of a supportive fanbase to a comeback, do you? Everyone loves an underdog. Who cares if the underdog in question is pulling millions in advertising funding from a publisher like Sony? It's purely vibes-based. Public opinion turning against a company makes the company seem like the one to root for, provided you've got zero fucking class consciousness (as is true for most Americans, who will make up the overwhelming majority of discussion on any given English-speaking website).

You'd assume then, naturally, that No Man's Sky has been made very good in the intervening seven years since its release. For anything to have such a positive reputation and such fanatical word-of-mouth proselytizing in wholly-unrelated conversations, to be anything less than stellar would be shocking. After all, No Man's Sky is held up as the poster boy for games being saved by the creators refusing to give up on them. So it's great, right? Good, at least?

No, it's one of the worst pieces of shit I've ever played.

No Man's Sky feels like a minimum viable product, emphasis on product. It's bordering on not being a game. People like to joke a lot about visual novels not really being games, and that's kind of true in the sense that your interactivity with them are going to be limited relative to other genres; especially in the case of kinetic novels, the actual "gameplay" is about as involved as turning pages in a book. Where visual novels distinguish themselves, however, is in the holistic experience: the visuals, the music, the sound design, the narratives. No Man's Sky does not have the decency to provide anything in these categories that is even remotely up to par. The gameplay loop itself consists of moving from Point A to Point B, shooting procgen plants and animals with a laser along the way, opening up your crafting menu, crafting something that will allow you to either craft more things or move to Point C, and then repeating for what How Long to Beat claims is thirty straight hours. There is barely anything beyond this. The game came out in 2016 but looks like a middle-era PS3 title, the music is literally randomly generated, the sounds may as well be Unity store assets, and whatever narrative is present is thin to the point of not being worth discussing. It really is kind of remarkable that after this many additions and changes over the course of over half a decade, what’s here still feels like it’s about eighteen months out from being ready to ship.

A friend of mine made the comment that if someone hooked me up to an EEG while I was playing, the machine reading my brain waves would report that I was comatose. I don't think I've ever been less engaged with a game than I've been in No Man's Sky; conversely, though, I don't believe that it's possible for anyone to be more engaged with it than I was. I'm loath to imagine the kind of person who sits down with No Man's Sky, plays it, and walks away at the end of the session feeling like they've done anything other than waste their time. I genuinely struggle to place myself in the shoes of anyone who can find this to be an enjoyable experience. There is nothing here. This game is void. I can only guess that the act of running around a barren, procedurally-generated planet with procedurally-generated fauna and procedurally-generated music and procedurally-generated sound effects is somehow what’s drawing people in, though I can’t for the life of me figure out why. People like to trot out that line about media being “soulless”, and I can’t think of a better word to describe this. It’s soulless. It’s endless capital-C Content being put together and delivered by a computer and then given to a player who has fucking nothing to do in all of this infinity. Much in the way that the bowls of gray slop that Neo ate in The Matrix were food, No Man’s Sky is a video game.

What I resent the most about No Man’s Sky, however, is the fact that it didn’t have the good sense to just quietly die after release and be eventually forgotten as another failure born from over-promises. I can accept that. I understand it. Shit happens. What bothers me is that Hello Games were either compelled to or felt it necessary to keep No Man’s Sky alive, always just on the periphery, dancing on the border between life and death — Victor Frankenstein throwing the switch to shock new and unnatural life into his monster’s decomposing parts. Knowingly or not, there’s poison in the well now, and so many dogshit, unfinished games now get to roll straight through production and onto the market in the wake that No Man’s Sky left behind. It was the first through the door in a paradigm shift that may well have been inevitable, but it’s still patient zero all the same. The sickest joke so far might be that Hunt Down the Freeman is now getting a remake, and people seem to be genuinely excited for it.

When I reviewed Hi-Fi Rush earlier this year, there was something I left unspoken that I think I should have said: Hi-Fi Rush reignited my faith in video games as a medium. Not that I believed it to be a dying format before — on the contrary, some of my favorite games have come out pretty recently — but it stood as a complete refutation of all of the marketing and middle manager meddling bullshit that financiers have been pushing ever since they realized how much money was in this shit. It shadowdropped, it didn’t have microtransactions, it provided an interesting spin on a niche gameplay loop, it was made by people with a clear vision and passion for what they were doing. It was a great game that proved you didn't need any of this superfluous marketing nonsense to succeed.

No Man’s Sky is the anti-Hi-Fi Rush. I have less faith in the medium after playing it and seeing the positive reception it’s gotten. If something is allowed to release broken, remain that way for years, and then still get celebrated and paraded as an example of how one ought never give up on a game when it’s still shit, then there really is no hope. People will defend fucking anything. It’s happening everywhere: PAYDAY 3 was nothing more than a start screen for nearly a week, and people still defended it, because it’ll be good eventually. Star Citizen has been pulling tens of thousands of dollars from clueless whales for years now, but it’s okay, because it’ll be good eventually. How about Diablo 4? We still waiting for that one to be good eventually? After all, No Man’s Sky had a bad launch too, and it became good eventually, right?

Fuck all of that. What’s so wrong about expecting a game to be good now?

Glimmers of greatness, marking Mike Klubnika as one to watch out for.

Anthology collections are always going to be a bit of a mixed bag. I don’t think I’ve ever seen one that stayed at a single level of quality throughout; Magnetic Rose from 1995’s Memories — one of the most beautiful pieces of animation I’ve ever seen — is only the first part of the collection, and is immediately followed up by Stink Bomb, which is roughly thirty minutes of a guy who can’t stop farting nerve gas. Stink Bomb isn’t bad, but holy fuck, is it no Magnetic Rose. Unsorted Horror is similarly not immune to anthology syndrome, and excellent pieces like the perspective-swapping Concrete Tremor sit a bit awkwardly next to Control Room Alpha’s core theme of “big spiders are scary”. Despite some inconsistencies, however, Unsorted Horror is still a collection that shows a lot of latent potential peeking through the cracks.

The Other Side was the first game offered to me, and it’s the first PAYDAY 2-themed horror game I’ve seen; you’re tasked with maintaining the biggest piece of shit drill ever engineered to put a hole through through a vault door, constantly topping it up with coolant, oil, fresh batteries, and new bits. It’s a lot of blind fumbling around to figure out what goes where and how it all works together, much in the same vein of a personal favorite like Nauticrawl, but it’s not especially polished; I managed to get softlocked the first time I needed to take the drill down for repairs, and that’s not very impressive for a game that’s only about fifteen minutes long. The ending is also pretty silly, culminating in the classic indie horror final shrug of “spawn a scary PNG that moves toward the player and then cut to credits”. It feels distinctly amateurish, and it’s not a great first step forward into the collection.

Control Room Alpha is next, and similarly fails to impress. The core conceit hinges almost exclusively on whether the player is scared of spiders; if you aren’t, then this is mostly just going to be you fucking around with a dipstick for a few minutes before a big spider jumps at you. There’s certainly something admirable about the way that Klubnika tries to build tension here, especially given how short of an experience it is — wandering outside to the spider pit when the equipment fails, having to very carefully move the samples while insects skitter around your station — but, again, if you aren’t afraid of spiders, then this isn’t going to do much for you. There’s another equally cheap jumpscare at the end of this one, too, and I was afraid we were going to fall into a pattern with the remaining three games.

Not the case, luckily! Carbon Steel is the third entry of the collection, and it’s far more feature-complete and engaging. I used to daydream about being a lab technician when I was younger, just getting to work as some sort of scientist; it was a pretty simple imagining of how such a job would function, given that I was a child who thought scientists were just people like Doc Brown or Dexter who fucked around with machines and chemicals all day, but it was something I fantasized about all the same. While real lab techs do boring shit like crystal chromatography, Carbon Steel lets you run experiments on live sea monsters that are constantly threatening to break out of their rusty tubes and savage you for your hubris. Sick. There’s a neat little plot running through this that gives a bit more context and worldbuilding than I was expecting from such a breezy title, and it provides a lot of motivation to do things properly. Or really, really wrong. Your choice. Things were starting to look up.

Concrete Tremor is next, and it’s the easy stand-out of the lot. Multiple perspectives, a slowly-unfolding story, and some truly chilling moments make for a wonderful piece of dream-like horror. The Battleship game that goes down at the end gives you the opportunity to get a phone call from someone in a group of people you were playing as earlier, and there’s an exchange between your old character and your new one that actually managed to get an audible reaction out of me. It’s my understanding that this one is actually offered as a standalone title, along with every other game I’ve mentioned previously, and I’d seriously suggest just getting this one if you aren’t in the mood to play through the entire collection.

We round things off with The Tartarus Engine, which was created exclusively for this anthology, and it shows; it feels the most obviously like the sum total of Klubnika’s talents, mixing a lot of systems and knowledge together into something that feels remarkably cohesive. He’s gotten a bit better at writing, a bit better at coming up with diagetic ways to convey information to the player, a bit better at constructing level layouts, a bit better at creating a consistent art style. You can see a lot of elements of the other works present in Unsorted Horror cropping up here, and it makes you feel like something of a proud parent to see the developer applying all of his learned talents at once. That said, Tartarus Engine isn’t my favorite of the lot — that still goes to Concrete Tremor — but it’s easily the piece that shows the most promise for Klubnika’s future work. Frantically checking your watch as the time you have to hack into the machine slowly ticks away is a wonderful little mechanic, and it fits the short runtime perfectly.

Unsorted Horror is a bit of a mixed bag, but the title should have given that much away. While it’s certainly not going to be winning any awards, this is still a nice portfolio to show off a lot of little, unique ideas. The indie horror scene is currently going through some weird growing pains, with a deluge of scary children’s mascots designed purely for the sake of having Game Theory videos made about them and liminal space walking simulators where a scary monster eventually jumps out at you and screams until your speakers pop; anything being made today that can break free of these amateur trappings is deserving of your attention. Going off of what’s here, you’d be smart to keep an eye on Klubnika from here on out. He’s gonna make something truly spectacular sooner rather than later, and you won’t want to miss it when he does.

Nobody gets it perfect on their first try, but some get a lot closer to it than others.

When something exists for as long as you've been around, it doesn't tend to impress. We're born onto an oxygen-rich planet with a sun and a moon and seasons and weather and days and nights, but these have all been around for as long as humanity has been, so nobody's really all that surprised by them anymore. Electricity in the home is a fairly recent development in the history of the imperial core, but most of the first people to get power have died off by now; us, the ones left, have almost all lived in a world where electricity has always been there. Video games at large are certainly a very new development, and your grandparents probably grew up long before the first consoles released. For you, statistically speaking, video games have always been here.

For me, Silent Hill has always been here.

I didn't really become self-aware until sometime in the later months of 2001, and Silent Hill had already been out and influencing developers for two whole years by that point. I was late to the party, to be certain. I've never been conscious of a world without Silent Hill in it. When you're in a position like mine (and judging by the site demographics, most of you are, too), it becomes difficult to truly appreciate the influence that this has had. Everyone "knows" that Silent Hill is probably one of the most important horror games ever made, but it's another thing entirely to experience it for yourself, to see the origin point; everything branching off from this central root like little fingers, stretching just far away enough until they're distinct enough to become something new. Fatal Frame, Signalis, Deadly Premonition: all titles with other inspirations, to be certain, yet enough of their branches reaching directly back to Silent Hill as veins to a heart.

What you're looking at here is primordial ooze; bubbling, boiling-hot muck that will one day form the foundations of all that is to come. It drips from the stitches holding together the stretched-hide wallpaper and weeps from the sores of the skinless monstrosities roaming the rusted steel streets. It pours in from the gaps of reality. "Blood and pus flow from the bathroom faucet", Lisa Garland writes in her diary, and there's no better way to describe Silent Hill than with that.

Silent Hill is a town unplugged from life support. It's a decaying corpse long before the nightmares start becoming real. The only usable roads are the ones that leave town, and the rest have fallen into disrepair. The young people are leaving in droves — seemingly the only ones to realize that there's nothing here left worth sticking around for. Around the corners of the tourist traps that keep the town's blood pumping, in the dark places where no one ever looks, a black market drug ring works through every night. They churn out bottle after bottle of little white pills, flooding the streets with product. The real, hard stuff. Addictive, hallucinogenic. The type of shit that you'd kill for another dose of. When you can make something that moves that fast, the only thing you need is a distributor. Some people will do anything for money.

Silent Hill 3 is one of my favorite games of all time, and Silent Hill 2 occupied that same position for the several years before I’d gotten around to its sequel. In spite of that, though, I’d never actually played the first Silent Hill. The second game in the series is essentially standalone, which means it's more or less fine as a starting point, but the third is a direct continuation of the first. I went into Silent Hill knowing exactly how the game ends, because Silent Hill 3 assumed that I already knew. Oops.

The game starts slow. Real slow. Too slow, for certain. It makes me feel like a bit of a Philistinic dipshit to say it, but there’s a line between slow-burn horror and dragging your feet, and Silent Hill steps well over the former and into the latter. I mean, I get it. There’s very clear intent here — stumbling through an ocean of fog so thick that it actually hurts your eyes trying to make out whatever’s lurking within, groping blindly at painted-on doors and litter on the ground in the hopes of finding something to advance the narrative — but in practice, it's mostly made up of sprinting down a road for a minute or two before realizing you're going down another fucking dead end. Enemies in the early parts of the game are too slow to keep up with Harry at a full sprint, meaning you’re not really in any danger unless you slam face-first into a wall while one is on your heels. Given how wide the streets are, avoiding enemies is pretty trivial, and outrunning them until they de-aggro is even easier. This gets far more complicated as the game goes on, the passageways get narrower, and the monsters get faster and more aggressive, but the town of Silent Hill isn’t especially interesting to run through at the start.

Luckily, it’ll only take about half an hour tops before you get to the school, and that becomes the point where the game immediately picks up and never stops going. You really don’t spend a lot of time in that opening part of Silent Hill; once you clear the school, you cross the bridge to a different part of town and never return. There’s a constant forward momentum that keeps pushing at your back like a strong wind, always demanding you keep driving forward. Monster chases get longer, and the game will start actively fucking with you by playing loud crashes and roars during sprints down long corridors. There isn’t really anything there (provided you’re enough of a Darwin Award winner to actually stick around and find out), but the masterful sound design works in tandem with the tank controls to ensure that you really never want to waste time lingering turning around to check it out. Your radio is squealing at you, the monsters are growling and snapping, the music sounds like someone taking a rotary saw to a concrete sidewalk. Stopping to investigate will often mean eating a hit, if not dying outright. So keep moving. Don’t look back.

It ties in nicely with Harry Mason's character, especially in regards to how given he is to just charging forward into the gaping maw of danger to find his daughter. Unlike a lot of the intense, angry, Liam Neeson Taken-types that have cropped up in a lot of popular media, Harry is just kind of a cool guy. He loves Cheryl and he's willing to fling himself deeper into this hellish town to find her, no matter how many people tell him she's definitely already been killed by the roaming monsters; he wants to protect and help the other people stuck in the town with him, even at his own expense. He's there for Cybil, for Lisa, for Kaufmann. I like Harry. It's refreshing to see a game starring a guy who's completely normal and just wants the best for everyone else, especially when you put him in the middle of the most evil setting imaginable and he still doesn't compromise on those ideals.

The constant escalation offers some great thematic cohesion, reflecting this building fear of running out of time. As Harry chases down one dead lead after another, the town devolves deeper and deeper into a nightmare-scape, no longer able to hold itself together in material reality. It culminates in the absolutely incredible Nowhere, a place constructed from the pure id of a dreaming girl who's been dying for nearly a decade straight — her divided soul keeping her perched on the line between life and the void. Doors lead to different floors despite no change in elevation, keys are hidden inside bags of jellybeans, symbols of protection need to be collected and bartered in order to progress. Harry's already spent enough time today destroying the one symbol that would have solved everyone's problems, so now he gets to collect five of them to open the boss door.

If you play Harry as a decent guy who tries to solve everyone's problems, you're rewarded with a shockingly positive ending for something that, until this point, has been so relentlessly horrific. It's almost completely unambiguous. Everyone who deserves their comeuppance gets it, and everyone who deserves a break gets one. After all of the suffering — felt by both the characters and by you — it's nice to feel your head breaking through the surface of the water to get a gasp for air.

While it feels a little quaint to call the game gorgeous, I can't find another word for it. This is probably the best looking game on the PS1, and now that we've got a glut of indie games going for the same low-poly look, Silent Hill looks remarkably fresh today. What's old is new again, I suppose. I do wish that they had prioritized the performance a little bit more, though, even if they would have needed to compromise on visuals; the game often dips down into the low double digits when there's a single monster chasing you in an open part of the map, and god help your frame rate if you ever get unlucky enough to be attacked by three monsters at the same time. A minor performance hit here and there is acceptable, but this likes to border on unplayable just a little bit too frequently.

Still, though, what's here is phenomenal. It never manages to hit the highs of Silent Hill 2 or 3, but this was their first try. It's already impressive before you take that into account. All it needed was a little more money and a little more time to be truly perfect, and that was a luxury only afforded to the following games after this showed sufficient potential. This one was the first, and it was made by employees who had been kicked down into Konami's basement in the hopes that they would quit. This might be the absolute best that anyone could have done, given the circumstances.

If you stick around past the credits, you’re treated to a little blooper reel of all the characters laughing and mugging for the camera, complete with Happy Days-esque name plates that fade in over a freeze frame while they do something silly. There’s something about making this the final sequence you leave the player with that really stuck with me; this is a game that’s confident. Team Silent is swinging dick. They made something that was impressive, and they knew it was impressive. Nothing reserved, nothing to be humble about. “Yeah, we can end our horror game on shots of Dahlia smooching the lens and Harry posing on a diner booth like he’s auditioning for Vogue. Of course we can. Why wouldn’t we? We’ve earned it. We just made Silent Hill.”

Damn right they did.

Overkill pulls an “Overkill”.

PAYDAY 2 is a game that, while not especially near-and-dear to my heart, is something I still have a great fondness for. Back in 2013, myself and a couple of my high school buddies picked up the four-pack on release day and promptly played it into the ground. One thing that we loved doing were hybrid stealth-loud runs; we’d go in, run stealth for as long as we could, inevitably fuck up, and then finish up the heist with guns a-blazing. Overkill quickly patched the way that concealment worked, so that players wearing heavy armor would be spotted by guards within fractions of a second. Dominated guards started having their pagers go off, and clearing all of the security on a map would result in reinforcements showing up for no reason to muck up your routes. Stealth heists became all-or-nothing overnight. You either did a full suit-only, minimal-kill run and restarted when you got caught, or you didn’t bother doing them at all. I didn’t enjoy heisting in stealth after that.

Not too long after that, Overkill added a movie trailer for the then-unknown John Wick to the intro of the game, meaning that you got to watch an advert on every boot. Crimefest 2015 wrapped up with Overkill adding paid lootboxes containing guns with superior stats that you couldn’t get by any other means. I fell out of love with PAYDAY 2; the developers and publishers had jointly fucked enough of it up that I couldn't bring myself to play it any longer. The moment PAYDAY 3 was announced, I told everyone who would listen the exact same thing: “I want to get in on this before they have a chance to fuck it up”. Overkill were going to fuck it up, I knew that much. It was just going to be a matter of when.

I didn’t expect it to be on release day.

We arrive now to PAYDAY 3, a game that's a step down from its predecessor in nearly every way imaginable. Worse progression, worse soundscapes, worse music, bland heists, and always-online servers that are still struggling to function six goddamned days after the scheduled release date.

If Cyberpunk 2077 didn’t exist, this would easily be the most botched launch of the past decade. Back when Diablo 3 released — one of the most notorious always-online titles — Blizzard’s servers choked, serving players across the globe with the infamous Error 37. Memes mocking it were everywhere. You couldn’t escape them. Wherever you looked, people were talking about Error 37 like it was the Super Bowl; everybody was constantly going on and on about how it was a complete failure on Blizzard’s part. And it was, to be clear. But do you remember how long Error 37 lasted for? It was such a big event, and people talked about it for so long, so surely it must have been a while. Two weeks, at least? A month?

One day. Blizzard had it mostly sorted within 24 hours.

How sorry of a state we find the modern gaming industry in where PAYDAY 3 has been literally unplayable for most of its buyers for what’s coming up on a week now and people are still making excuses for it. Only in video games is it still acceptable — worth playing defense for, even! — to sell a broken product at a premium. Many have been pointing fingers around, insisting that it’s the fault of someone else; Overkill/Starbreeze are blaming AccelByte (their server provider) for not being able to handle the influx of players, the gamethinkers are blaming Deep Silver for presumably forcing some hands to make the game always-online, and people who have had to deal with Overkill’s bullshit before are saying that the fault lies squarely at the feet of the developers.

Here’s the thing: I don’t really give a fuck whose fault it is. What I care about is the fact that the game doesn’t work.

Even in the brief flickers where it does manage to suck down a gasp for life, though, PAYDAY 3 feels remarkably unfinished. I’ve got a sneaking suspicion that everything that’s here was cobbled together in about a year and promptly rushed out the door; it’s got some of the worst UX I’ve seen in a game in recent memory, and getting anything to work feels like an active battle with the program. No longer can you pick a heist, set up a lobby, advertise that you’re going loud or stealthy, and let other players trickle in; everything is now relegated to matchmaking that’s split up by difficulty tiers, meaning that there are effectively 32 (eight heists by four difficulties) blind queues going at any given time. If you want to do, say, Dirty Ice on Very Hard stealth, you need to queue it up, hope you get dropped into a lobby with people in it, hope that other people show up before the five-minute auto-start goes off, and hope that every other person there is also trying to do stealth, since there’s no longer any pre-game chat or lobby tags to coordinate these things before the heist starts. Shop weapons (and masks, and suits) are no longer split up into categories and are instead dumped haphazardly into a single big list, making it difficult to tell what goes in which slot. Securing bags and loose cash no longer alerts you to their value, making it look like they’ve just disappeared into thin air; the first time I tossed a bag off a bridge and into a helicopter, it vanished without any fanfare and made me think that I'd thrown it out of bounds. For some ungodly reason, typing anything in text chat requires you to hit the enter key twice before you can start writing. Sometimes, while in menus, hitting backspace will send you back to where you were; other times, you'll need to hit escape.

The UI is similarly atrocious, and reeks of being made up of placeholder assets — ignoring, of course, when they are literally just placeholder assets. The iconic, flashing POLICE ASSAULT warning in the top corner of the screen has now been replaced with plain, white, 24pt Arial; every menu option is a generic white-text-on-black-box that inverts when you hover over it; the ability to close the game is buried at the bottom of the "More" tab in the main menu. It's hard to describe, but I can assure you that it's not the kind of thing you want to experience for yourself. Buttons and menus just feel vaguely squishy, like whatever you're trying to select wants you to give it a couple of tries before it'll take. It just feels like it was made in a hustle; a minimally-viable product.

We've got eight heists on launch, and heist number nine isn't scheduled to come out until sometime this winter; aware readers should begin hearing the sound of alarm bells ringing at this point, considering how PAYDAY 2 launched with eleven heists and had five more added in the time it'll take PAYDAY 3 to add one. Also gone are multi-day heists, shrinking the diversity and length of available missions down even further. Everything on offer here feels like little more than a retread of already-existing heists: Road Rage is Green Bridge without an explosion, Dirty Ice is a slightly larger Diamond Store, Gold & Sharke is a scaled-down Big Bank, Touch The Sky is a near-perfect copy of Framing Frame Day 3 but during the daytime. Easily the worst part, however, is how nearly every heist just amounts to "go to a place and steal a thing". It's so dreadfully boring. There's nothing here that even grazes the unique setpieces found in the earlier games, like the meth-cooking in Rats, or the deal-gone-bad in Undercover, or the property destruction in Mallcrasher. It's just break in, bag up some loot, throw it in a van or a helicopter, and then leave. Nothing we haven't seen a dozen times before already. Where's the creativity?

And speaking of, the new skill system is just as lifeless. Just about every option is some variation of "gain X% to [stat]", with almost nothing else on offer. Stuns you dish out last 20% longer, marked enemies are marked for 20% longer, getting ammo from an ammo bag gives you +20% damage for ten seconds, you can perform takedowns 20% faster. It's all just numbers buffs. While anyone who's played PAYDAY 2 on the higher difficulties knows about the importance of damage breakpoints, these are fucking boring boosts that do nothing besides make your numbers a bit bigger. Where are my Jokers? Where's Inspire? Where's Bulletstorm, or Graze, or Hostage Taker, or even just the ICTV? If you don't want to bring these skills back, at least come up with something new that can substitute as a meaningful upgrade. High-tier skills in PAYDAY 2 often drastically changed the way that you would interact with the game, adding new mechanics and playstyles to use in taking down the cops; here, they do little more than provide some damage and resistance buffs.

The progression system is terrible, top to bottom. It's one thing to make it move at a snail's pace — I only unlocked two guns in two hours of playtime, when launch PAYDAY 2 would have given me ten in the same amount of time — but it's another completely to make it purely challenge-based, too. Following in the much-maligned steps of Halo Infinite, heists themselves no longer offer any form of experience; the only means of leveling up is by completing challenges, all of which are some variation on "kill X amount of enemies with Y weapon" or "complete X heist Y amount of times". While challenges early on are plentiful and easy to complete, they swiftly devolve into mindless grinding once you get the initial handful out of the way. One challenge asks you to finish the first heist in the game one hundred and fifty times before it pays out the experience points. I cannot even begin to imagine how they decided that this was preferable to just giving a flat amount of experience points at the end of a heist; it's possible (and becoming increasingly common as more players get higher in level) to finish a heist where you steal every single piece of loot on the map and get ultimately rewarded with zero experience. With cash being as plentiful as it is, experience points are the gate to you accessing the rest of the content. Without experience, you can't actually unlock anything to spend your mountains of money on, unless you really feel like buying dozens of CAR-4s with differing paint jobs. Even then, half of the fucking paint colors are locked behind level gates.

It's not a drip feed. It's more like water torture.

There's more to complain about, but this is already getting a little excessive. There's more to be said about the loss of Simon Viklund and the subsequent downgrade in both music and gun sounds, there's more to be said about the fact that you have to wait in a queue even for single-player games, there's more to be said about how navigating the menus feels like fumbling around in a dark room for the light switch, there's more to be said about how they went back to obfuscating weapon stats instead of just giving you the numbers, there's more to be said about how the too-snappy reload animations look like they're sloppily aping Call of Duty: Warzone's, there's more to be said about how the inevitable microtransactions are going to fuck this game up even further. There's more to be said, but I'm exhausted. I don't want to think about this game anymore.

This is the kind of abject flop that I'm not entirely certain Starbreeze will be able to bounce back from. The company is already standing on Bambi legs after brushes with bankruptcy caused by Overkill's The Walking Dead and a full-on INTERPOL raid as part of an insider trading investigation, and another failure on this scale might not be something they can afford to suffer. PAYDAY 3 ads were plastered all over the front page of Steam the day that this dropped, and the game completely vanished from the list of top sellers within the first few days. At the time of writing, there are about 5,000 more players online in PAYDAY 2 than there are in PAYDAY 3, and those are really not the kinds of numbers you would hope to see not even a week after release. Starbreeze's stock prices have plummeted to their lowest point in four years, and the last time it dropped this far down was when Bo Andersson was getting walked out of the studio in handcuffs.

It's sad. I like PAYDAY well enough as a series. I wanted this to succeed. It didn't, and I doubt it will.

There is no reason to play PAYDAY 3 in a world where PAYDAY 2 still exists.

The student becomes the master overnight.

Lies of P is a game that came completely out of nowhere, left no impression on me beyond "why would someone make a dark, moody game about Pinocchio", and then managed to completely eclipse every expectation I had. I got back on Game Pass for Starfield and PAYDAY 3, and decided to give this a crack solely as a might-as-well-try-it; not only is this the better of those, it's one of the finest games I've ever played. I mean this honestly and heretically: it is better than all three mainline entries of the Dark Souls series.

Yes, Lies of P is derivative. No, this does not detract from its quality. The obsession with "newness", both as an inherent virtue and as something all creators ought to strive for, is an ideal forced to take root almost exclusively at the behest of European bourgeois Romantics all looking to (ironically enough) copy what Rousseau was telling them to do in the 1700s. Art as a whole has spent centuries upon centuries cribbing from other pieces to put itself together, and it's a fairly recent development that doing shit that someone else did but in your own way is seen as a failure of the artist. I, personally, do not care about this in the slightest. If you do, I would ask only that you examine why you believe this to be so; do you have a legitimate grievance against derivative works for any reason other than because others have told you that they're some synonym for "bad"?

Round8 Studio has come almost completely out of nowhere to deliver something that's immensely fun to play, narratively engaging, and utterly gorgeous in just about every area you can find yourself in. Any developer that can come out swinging this hard and connect with just about every blow deserves to be celebrated. There's a lot to talk about, and certainly a lot of it is in regards to the way that people are talking about it. I'll get my core thesis out of the way, first:

If you like Dark Souls, you'll probably like this game.

If you've made liking Dark Souls into a defining personality trait of yours, you're going to fucking hate this game.

Lies of P rides a fine line of being distinct, but not different. The overlap between FromSoft's PS3-and-onward output is broad, borrowing bits and pieces and rearranging them around; something similar to Sekiro parries, something similar to a Bloodborne dodge, something similar to the Dark Souls 3 enemy ambushes. But Lies of P is distinct enough in its execution of these elements that long-time Souls players will unilaterally be chin-checked when they try bringing over their muscle memory from these other titles.

Perfect guards are a guard, not a parry, and tapping the block button Sekiro-style will make you eat a hit. The dodge offers fast, generous invincibility, but it's never as safe as the one in Bloodborne is; enemies using their big red attacks will cut through your i-frames by design, encouraging you to either parry or move well out of the way. Enemies will usually come in ones and be very obvious, but many will hide just out of sight in the hopes of clipping players who haven't yet been trained to look around before charging past a blind corner. The game is uncompromising in demanding the player to meet it on its terms, rather than copying wholesale from the games that obviously inspired it and allowing the skills you learned there to completely carry over.

If you try playing this exactly like every other FromSoft Souls game you've played up to this point, you will lose, and hard. If you can not (or will not) adapt, you will probably get filtered out by the Archbishop and start publicly wondering why anyone likes this game.

There's a very strange — and frankly, it feels borderline dishonest — set of complaints I've seen where people are just outright wrong about the way the game functions, and they then use their incorrect assumptions as a base from which to knock on the game. I've seen complaints that large weapons aren't viable because you don't get poise/super armor on heavy attacks; this is blatantly untrue, and charge attacks with heavy weapons will regularly blow straight through an enemy hit. People say the dodge is unreliable, but it really isn't; if you're getting caught, you're either messing up a (fairly generous) timing or you're getting hit by red fury attacks, which the game clearly tells you cannot be rolled through. People say it's an aesthetic rip-off of Bloodborne, and this really only applies to a couple of the eldritch enemies; Parisian streets, circus theming, and fantastical automatons lend to a pretty distinct visual identity from any of the other heavy-hitters in the genre.

People say the voice acting is bad, but most of the cast is made up of established, talented stage and screen actors returning from other games like Elden Ring and Xenoblade Chronicles 3, where their performances were lauded; they sound borderline identical to what they've done since just last year, so what makes it acceptable there, and laughable here? People say the translation is bad, but I only noticed a single grammar mistake and typo in my entire playthrough, and they were both buried in the flavor text of a gesture; the rest of the writing offered some evocative lines that managed to bounce between introspective, beautiful, and the coolest fucking thing I've ever read in my life. Where are these complaints coming from? Did we play the same game? It makes no sense. I'm losing my mind trying to figure out how anyone even came to most of these conclusions. It really feels like the most vocal naysayers only played enough of Lies of P to come up with a few surface observations and then made up the rest wholesale.

None of this is to imply that the game is without fault, because it isn't. Boss runs are still present in all of their vestigial glory, consistently adding a mandatory and boring twenty seconds before you can retry a failed boss attempt. Elite enemies — especially in the late game — are often such massive damage sponges that it's a complete waste of time and resources to actually bother fighting the ones that respawn. The breakpoint at which an enemy gets staggered is a hidden value, so you're always just hoping that the next perfect guard will be enough to trip it; we've already got visible enemy health bars here, so I can't see why we don't get enemy stamina bars, too. (Stranger of Paradise continues to be the most mechanically-complete game in this sub-genre.)

For these faults, though, there are at least as many quality-of-life changes that I'm astounded haven't been adopted elsewhere already. Emptying your pulse cells (your refillable healing item) allows you the opportunity to get one back for free if you can dish out enough damage. Theoretically, as long as you can keep up both your offense and defense, you have access to unlimited healing. It's such a natural extension of the Rally system, where you can heal chip damage by hitting foes; Bloodborne's implementation of blood vials looks completely misguided next to this. If you have enough Ergo to level up, the number in the top right corner of the screen will turn blue, no longer requiring you to manually check if you've got enough at a save point. When a side quest updates, the warp screen will let you know that something has happened, and where to start looking for the NPC that it happened to.

It's a challenging game, but it really isn't that hard. I do agree with the general consensus that it would be nice if the perfect guards could be granted a few extra frames of leniency. I managed to start hitting them fairly consistently around halfway through the game, but it's going to be a large hurdle that'll shoo off a lot of players who don't like such tight timings. Tuning it just a little bit would help to make it feel a bit more fair without completely compromising on the difficulty. Everything else, I feel, is pretty strongly balanced in the player's favor; I got through just about every boss in the game without summoning specters and without spending consumables, but they were all there for me if I really needed them. I'd like to go back and play through it again, knowing what I know now, and really lean into the item usage. It's not like you won't wind up with a surplus, considering how easy everything is to farm.

I understand that Bloodborne is something of a sacred cow, especially on this website — it's currently two of the top five highest-ranked games — so anything that seems like it's trying to encroach on its territory is going to be met with hostility before all else. I understand. It's a special game for a lot of people. That said, I'd suggest going into Lies of P with an open mind and a willingness to engage with the game on its own terms; you might manage to find it as impressive of a work as I do.

Quartz is stored in the P-Organ.

Like a cool glass of water on a summer afternoon.

I’ve tried getting into Ghost Trick a few times, but I never managed to stick with it for very long. I don’t really know why this is; Shu Takumi’s earlier Ace Attorney trilogy gripped me at a fairly young age and never let go, so I can’t really fathom why I kept dropping Ghost Trick not long after finishing the tutorial. I think it’s just because I hate timing puzzles. That’s a petty reason, but it’s the best I’ve got. After some consistent prodding from my good friend Chef033, however, I decided that I was gonna get all the way through Ghost Trick once and for all.

I did, and it ruled.

It’s the kind of game that’s hard to talk about without getting too deep into spoilers — it’s a murder-mystery, after all — and it benefits heavily from unearthing its secrets as you play. While some of the twists and turns are incredibly obvious (perhaps intentionally so), others will only become apparent about ten seconds before they happen. These latter moments are obscenely hype, and I wouldn’t dare dampen anyone’s experience by giving them away. If you know, you know; if you don’t, you should experience them for yourself.

The cast is full of colorful, larger-than-life characters, and you’d be hard-pressed to forget a single one of them by the time the credits roll. Each of them are given so much personality purely through these lavish, indulgent animations; Cabenela’s little Michael Jackson-inspired dance that he does when he enters a room reportedly took a month to animate, and it shows. Ghost Trick loves to keep crossing a line from “that’s impressive” to “how the fuck did they even manage to do this” pretty frequently, and it’s nothing short of a visual treat. The incredibly crunchy, pixellated models sell a strong visual identity, and it’s a style I vastly prefer over the remaster’s smooth, high-LOD variants.

And goddamn, the music is good. "GHOST TRICK" — the theme that likes to play at the end of chapters — is one of the best “you did it” songs of triumph I’ve heard in a game. From what I’ve read, a lot of the music was composed without Masakazu Sugimori nor assistant Yasumasa Kitagawa having context for what was actually going to be happening in the game, which is shocking. Everything fits together so neatly, and finding out that it was mostly just the product of “I’ve got a vibe in mind and I’m going to just make things that fit it” almost seems unbelievable. It’s like accidentally creating the final missing piece to a puzzle you’ve never seen before.

It’s an immensely, immensely impressive game, and the only foibles I can find are that having to loop through a lot of the same, slow events when you make a mistake can be frustrating. My emulator let me fast-forward through a lot of the repeated downtime, and I imagine I would have been a lot more annoyed if I needed to sit through it all in real time, every time. Even so, what’s here is still wonderful, and it deserves your attention. It took me far too long to get around to actually finishing it, but I’m very glad I ended up seeing it through to the end.

It’s “Missile”!

Oh, he's just like me!

Content warning for discussions of substance abuse and suicidal ideation.

I've been putting off writing this review for a while, because I think this is one of the most beautiful pieces of art ever created. More than any film, more than any song, and certainly more than any other video game. We all have some piece of media that feels wholly personal to us — if you haven't found yours yet, you will eventually — and Disco Elysium is mine. Nothing else has made me feel so seen, so understood; it's a very, very powerful feeling when you discover that you're not as alone as you thought you were. This is review #100, so fuck it. Let's do this.

My closest personal friends know about my struggles with alcoholism. Some of them are on Backloggd, but most of them aren’t, so this is going to be the first time a lot of you who only know me from here are going to hear about this. Some of the roughest years of my life kicked off in 2016. I’d grown up in an abusive household (surely a story for another time), and 2016 was the year that I turned 18. I worked as much as I could, neglected school as much as I was able to, moved out, and never looked back. It fucking sucked. It sucked slightly less than staying at home and having to deal with my father getting shitfaced and threatening to kill me every night, but it sucked.

In Canada, the legal drinking age is 19. We’ve got access to the stuff two years earlier than you Americans do. What that meant for me, with my big beard and sunken eyes and deep voice, was that nobody at the local liquor stores had been carding me since the eleventh grade. The laws have changed since then, and everyone now has to present ID regardless of how old they look — I had a fake in case they asked, anyway — but no cashier ever looked twice at me. So I had easy, consistent access to alcohol, and I gradually gained a dependence on the stuff. Well, I say “gradually”, but it was pretty fast. No pipeline for me, of having a drink before dinner turning into a couple, then a couple more; I drank as much as I could because it made me feel stupid, and then it made me fall asleep, and that was a pattern that felt better than dealing with my shriveling bank account and my constant desire to curl up and quietly die.

One day, probably about a year or two later — I know a lot of people mark the exact day they decided to start being sober, but I was going through my life in a complete fucking blur — I realized that I needed to either stop drinking, or it would kill me. I don’t know what triggered that thought, but I didn’t really care. I’d die, so what? Yeah, the thought was scary, but my life was shit. It’d be like getting upset over losing a quarter in the couch cushions. Oh, well.

Then, another thought hit me: you’re turning into your father.

That one got me.

Spite is a powerful motivator.

Disco Elysium came to me at a time where I was starting to settle into a sober groove. No more drinking, even though I still wanted it. If you’ve never dealt with substance abuse like that, imagine a big plate of your favorite food, constantly in front of you, and you’re not allowed to take a bite. Everyone else is always talking about how delicious it is, and how much they love it, and then they get weird when you try explaining that you can’t have any. People start talking about you behind your back, about how you’re “the guy who says he can’t have any”. Other people will actively bait you into trying some. They’ll tease you, call you a pussy, mock you for your boundaries. It’s shit. It’s fucking shit and it never goes away. I digress.

With time, it gets a little easier. You recognize the kinds of things that’ll set you off, that’ll make you want it. You learn to avoid them, you learn to cope with them. You make little deals with yourself, like how I swapped from booze to weed; the world’s no fun to take on completely sober, is my rationale. It’s the leaf or the sauce, and one of them is a whole lot fucking worse for me than the other.

The detective is in a very similar boat. He’s a man so subsumed by his addictions that he’s lost every part of him that isn’t defined by the substances he takes. His memory of who he is, what he believes, who he loves; it’s all gone, washed away beneath a tide of liquor and pills and powders and research chemicals. Ostensibly, the goal of the game is to solve a murder, but the real mystery is in uncovering who the detective is — was, perhaps — before he drowned every part of himself in drugs. If there’s nothing that can be remembered, it must be uncovered. If there’s nothing to be uncovered, it must be invented. Harry DuBois, Raphael Ambrosius Costeau, Tequila Sunset, the Icebreaker; who is he, really? Some of these? All of them? None?

As you play, the detective is constantly challenged to give in to his vices. It’s easy to take drugs. Beneficial, even! But everything in Revachol can be the catalyst for change, much as it can all be an excuse to keep things going as they are. The detective can begin the long, slow, arduous road to sobriety, doubtlessly inspired by his partner and friend Kim Kitsuragi.

Kim is one of the best characters ever written. He is everything the detective is not. He can control his urges. He’s got himself in order. What he sees in the detective does not impress him…initially. The detective, for all of his faults, has kept one thing true about himself; he is a damn good detective. Kim sees this. He latches onto it, and doesn’t let go. In the darkest times, in the hardest times, he reminds the detective that he is a damn good detective. The detective needs someone like Kim to ground him, and Kim needs someone like the detective to bring the case to a close. Getting Kim to trust you might be the greatest sense of achievement you will ever feel in a game. To be a constant fuck-up who eventually stops fucking up is a triumph, and Disco Elysium captures the feeling perfectly.

It’s no secret that Robert Kurvitz, the lead writer of the game, has struggled with substance abuse in the past. He once mentioned in an interview that he believed everyone else on the development team had, too. This is the kind of story that can only be written at this level of depth and nuance by people who truly understand what it’s like to find themselves at rock bottom and claw their way back up. It’s masterful. I’ve shed a lot of tears over Disco Elysium, and I know there are going to be a whole lot more to come.

I’m about five years dry, I think. My sense of time is all fucked up. It’s gotten easier to stay away, but not much.

Disco Elysium is still my favorite game.

Pirate it. ZA/UM got stolen from its creators by Estonian businessmen.

Strong bones, weak flesh.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution is the kind of game where it’s a miracle that it’s as good as it is, and yet it still manages to fall a little short. Anyone attempting to make a follow-up to 1999’s Deus Ex couldn’t possibly realize what they were setting themselves up for — that’s how we got Invisible War, after all — and dominant design trends of the early-2010’s didn’t exactly set a suitable stage for immersive simulators. Contemporary stealth games had sucked ass for years, too; a stealth-y immersive simulator that could come out as anything other than hot garbage was going to be an accomplishment.

Under those expectations, then, Human Revolution is probably the best game it could have been. All media will inevitably become a product of its time, and I think Human Revolution managed to hang on a few years past what should have been a very early expiry date. There’s a weird unskippable walk-and-talk section in the opening moments of the game, most of the social commentary is delivered with the grace of a brick soaring through a windshield, clear budget issues present themselves through the mass (re)use and abuse of hubs; all of these are era-specific foibles. You can’t play Human Revolution today without immediately catching the stink of 2011’s triple-A conventions wafting off of it. That stink might also be left over from the piss filter that they wiped off the screen in the Director’s Cut version of the game. I’m not sure.

But Human Revolution mostly manages to hold up. The characters are strong — Adam Jensen has remained a breakout favorite for many, with his constant, gravelly rasping and catty attitude — the gameplay is largely fine, and the atmosphere is thick. The streets of Detroit and Hengsha can suck you into themselves like quicksand if you aren’t paying attention, filled with little crooks and crevices to explore and loot. Even paths that lead to dead ends still reward you with XP, so the act of exploring never feels like a complete waste. You’ve only got a few flavors of builds; you can go one of stealth or non-stealth, and one of lethal or non-lethal. There’s not much point to mixing and matching, and the game itself is woefully easy to get through regardless of which build path you take. At the very least, no option feels wrong.

While the earliest parts of Human Revolution are strong, the game starts to lose its footing a bit as it goes on. The second visits to Detroit and Hengsha swiftly devolve into little more than running from one end of the map to the other in a continued series of acts that feels like the game is trying to stall for time. The DLC boat chapter from The Missing Link has been forcibly rolled into the main campaign, and it’s shit. There isn’t much more to say about it than that. It’s a hyper-linear slog with twists you can see coming from a mile away, and manages to be the worst combination of "too easy to be challenging" and "too long to wrap up before it gets boring". The Missing Link now acts as a ridiculously tall speed bump in the late-middle of a game that’s already beginning to drag its feet, and whatever momentum Human Revolution had before it put you on the boat evaporates just in time for the final stretch to begin.

It’s certainly not a bad game, by any means, and the opening segments are far stronger than I remember them being. The game ends weakly, though, and that’s always going to feel worse than the inverse. This is the exact kind of project that I wish could have been made with a bit more time, a bit more money, a bit more freedom. As it stands, it’s still a competent follow-up to Deus Ex. It never could have been better than what came before it, given the climate that Human Revolution released in, but it’s an admirable attempt all the same. A few issues spoil it, but there’s nothing here that isn’t salvageable.

You can make Adam Jensen say he “never asked for this” to like four different people before the credits roll. It’s really cute seeing him make up his own catchphrase.

Sorry, baby. I just don't love you the way I used to.

It's not you. It's me. You haven't changed, even though you really should have. You're still as much of a buggy mess as you were on release, with all of your crashes and non-functional mechanics, but those never bothered me. A couple community patches — you always did have a tendency to rely on others to make you work properly — and you're about as stable as you could have been. So why is it that I'm coming back to you over a decade later, with all of my fond memories, and I find that whatever spark we once had is now gone?

It's because you're boring, baby. That's the awful truth.

I really did think I was above such a petty complaint. I mean, your writing is excellent. You've got some incredibly strong characters and storylines, and you allow for a way more freeform approach to your narrative than most of your contemporaries could ever dream of. You've got a tone about you. Nobody could ever look at you and mistake you for anyone other than yourself.

But your moment-to-moment experience is just so boring. So repetitive. All I'm doing is walking. Walking and walking and walking from flat plain of dirt to flat plain of dirt, and then fast traveling between flat plains of dirt, while one of about five licensed songs play on loop. You've got the shortest playlist in the world. You've got spurs that jingle-jangle, you were always a fool for your Johnny, yippee-yay, I know it all. I could always turn off your radio and listen to the ambience of the areas around me, but your environmental sound design just isn't up to par. I don't blame you. You didn't even have a year to get ready. It's not your fault.

You take way too long to get going, and by the time we get there, I've seen everything you've had to offer me a hundred times over. I'm sure some people would say that I'm not treating you the way that I ought to, and I'm just being unfair because I've played too much of you. Maybe. But I've visited old favorites that I've been with a lot longer than you, baby, and none of them bored me the way that you do now. I can't keep feeling like the burden is on me to make you more fun; like I need to be the one going out of my way to get all of these mods and patches for you when keeping me entertained is your job.

I know nobody ever came to you for the gameplay, but you keep insisting on putting it front and center. I can't get away from it. If there was about 50% less "game" in this game, it would still be too much for what it currently is. It's borderline vestigial. I know that you care a lot more about your story, and so do I. I wish that you could have just focused on what you were good at. Your environments aren't pretty enough to get lost in, and they're not enough of a traversal challenge to be engaging; all I'm doing is walking forward and popping the occasional enemy, and it's just not enough.

What more can I say? I've fallen out of love. A classic needs to hold up to be a classic, and the twelve years since your release have left me unsure if you ever even qualified. You were novel once, and now you're not. You could have been more, but neither your publishers nor your developers were keen on that idea. You were rushed, and it'll always show.

I got carded trying to buy this at a Gamestop in 2011 and was refused because I didn't have my ID on me.

The end of the beginning of the end.

There was a stench that lingered in the air. The first to emerge from the miasma, sick and shambling, was Silent Hill: Origins. Middling at its highest points, Origins was unwell. A gaiden game though it may have been — as was the refrain from fans, all collectively bargaining for this to be a singular misstep and nothing more — it warned of worse yet to come. Silent Hill, no longer in the hands of its rightful creators, had been set loose. As a pig breaks from its enclosure and becomes a feral boar, Silent Hill slipped through the fence posts and morphed into something foul.

The stench got stronger. Eyes watered. The tolling of the final bell marked the way that all would be for the days to come. Blood and shit and rust and slime wept outward from within its confines. What little hope still remained would have been better left abandoned. Silent Hill: Homecoming had at last arrived. Marked not by any ceremony nor celebration, Homecoming was the darkened star that shone over all, calling to consciousness a single truth: everything you hold dear can be taken away.

Its kingly ambition had been betrayed early, having the gall to call itself Silent Hill 5 before release. No longer intended as a simple spin-off, Homecoming was an explicit continuation of the series; the franchise being stripped from Team Silent and sent overseas to be repackaged into something with more mass market appeal. Everyone within Team Silent had been kicked down from higher positions within Konami; underdogs who warred back against the company’s internal bureaucracy to create on their own terms. Silent Hill was the end-product of years of gnashing teeth and desperate cobbling-together, the act of creation as a tool to be wielded against those who had pushed them down.

Now, it was no longer theirs.

Homecoming is a strange and unnerving amalgamation, influenced not by prior games but by movies based on them; the overuse of Pyramid Head, the sound design, the increased and ill-advised focus on “the action” over building atmosphere. The once-universally praised narratives to be found within the series, tackling impressively difficult subjects, have now been swapped out for little more than a hollow video tour, whisking the player from spooky setpiece to spooky setpiece with all the thematic depth and implication of Disney’s Haunted Mansion ride. Homecoming has nothing to say, because Homecoming does not exist. Homecoming is a few other games and movies standing on each other’s shoulders in an overcoat.

There is no imagination here, no understanding of dread. Enemies shamble towards you, lit from all angles despite the entire game taking place at night time, loudly shrieking or gurgling or barking as they charge. Too slow to be a threat, but too fast to evoke Romero-esque monsters, every enemy manages to hit a perfect balance of being both bland and generic. Left 4 Dead has more clever monster designs, and those aren’t attempting to evoke a specific character’s fears simply because that’s what Silent Hill 2 did. The meat-dogs in Homecoming stand as the strongest possible condemnation of the game’s artistic decisions; no longer lit in inky shadows, seemingly dripping through the darkness to reveal themselves, the new meat-dogs are bright-red, flayed canines who do little more than sprint shrieking at the player and bite them for very little damage. Americans think horror is when something is loud.

An utterly insipid narrative rounds out the combat-roll, knife fight gameplay, bending itself in knots in the hopes that the attempt will be enough to distract from every other element. Alex is a combat veteran, but not really. His brother is alive, but not really. His dad is a cool guy, but not really. Events seem to happen arbitrarily, perhaps each one marking a spot where the developers thought players would be getting bored; sudden black-out stage transition sequences of drunk-tank escapes and county jail gate puzzles pepper themselves through long sections of walking that were used in prior games to establish a tone, and are used here to disguise loading screens. Homecoming can only be defined by its limitations, because it makes no efforts to overcome them. It coasts on its reputation, like a bad student whose father is alumni.

This is what I despise most about Homecoming. It’s a game that’s wholly content to ride the coattails of work done by better, more talented, more passionate artists, and it’s one that was rewarded wholly for doing nothing by being gifted to a no-name studio by Konami. What did The Collective do as a studio to be handed this franchise without seemingly any publisher oversight? Was Buffy the Vampire Slayer on the Xbox that much of a hit? Did Konami believe that their seminal 2006 movie tie-in game The Da Vinci Code was evidence that they were going to handle this series with respect? Or did Konami simply sell off the rights to the lowest bidder just so they could get a quick buck off of a franchise they didn’t respect, made by employees who they loathed?

It's a despicable creation, and stands as a putrid reminder that concepts like "merit" and "self-expression" are air. Here, there is nothing besides what is most profitable for the parent company.

A foul cloud hangs over Homecoming. May it never thin.

“I’m not like the other girls,” she said, exactly like the other girls.

Bulletstorm is ass, but it’s a certain kind of ass that we don’t really get too often anymore. Slow, plodding, juvenile, desperate to be proven, but just not having the technical nor narrative chops to differentiate itself from its contemporaries. For all of its attempts at grit and bombast, it just comes off as being pathetic.

The successes of Halo as a franchise ruined shooters for years, but its impact left a smoking crater in the libraries of every home console. Regardless of whether or not you actually like the series, it’s impossible to deny that developers for the sixth and seventh gens of consoles were falling over themselves to Xerox their own version in the hopes that they’d get a sliver of Bungie’s billion-dollar pie. Halo standardized systems in console shooters the way that Mario standardized holding the B button to run: two-weapon limits, regenerating health/shields, slow movement. If you played a console shooter between the years 2001 and 2016, they were almost literally all like this. When you’ve got a standard that’s been in place for a decade and a half, people will inevitably start getting antsy. It’ll start small, at first, but they’re gonna want something new.

Bulletstorm promised innovation.

It’s quaint, looking back on the marketing surrounding this game from twelve years ago. Epic Games went on the attack against Call of Duty — of all things — with the release of Duty Calls, a five-minute gag game that mocks the aforementioned series for being sluggish, filling itself with unnecessary cutscenes, giving the player a uselessly short jump, constantly overusing slow-motion, and having paper-thin characterization. It certainly wasn’t the most clever takedown, but it got the broader Internet's attention, and that meant a lot more in 2011 than it does in 2023. If People Can Fly could deliver on their promise of a title that actively refuted all of these factors, it was going to be a shoo-in for shooter of the year.

Bulletstorm released about three weeks later, and it was sluggish, full of unnecessary cutscenes, lacked a jump button entirely, constantly overused slow-motion, and had paper-thin characterization. It had a hard three-weapon limit (though one of them had to be your starting assault rifle), regenerating health, and slow movement.

Perhaps the greatest crime of Bulletstorm is not that it failed to deliver on virtually any of its promises, but rather the fact that the strongest peaks it can hit are still no better than boring. The skillshot system is genuinely interesting and by rights should have been enough to carry the experience on its back by itself, but it’s a) incredibly restrictive due to the weapon limit and the inability to swap to new ones outside of shops, and; b) nowhere near rewarding enough. The point of the points is that they allow you to purchase upgrades, but most of them are strictly boring number bonuses. Higher ammo caps, additional leash charges, not much else. The bulk of your points are actually just going to wind up being spent on ammunition, because enemies scarcely drop fucking anything.

If Bulletstorm had skipped the upgrade purchasing system entirely and made trickshots provide the player with health and ammo (ala nu-DOOM glory kills or Ultrakill blood showers), there would have been significantly more of an incentive to actually bother. As it stands, setting up these clever kills is both harder to do than just popping the enemies with your default rifle and doesn’t provide enough of a mechanical reward to make up for it. If you’re relying on the act alone being enough to entice players into doing it, you need to be very confident that they won’t start feeling like it’s routine the hundredth time they fling a guy into the air and shoot him with a firework.

You've got a narrative here that's equal measures "ha ha, who cares about video game stories" constantly warring with its other half that won't stop screaming "please take me seriously". Characters won't stop yelling about dicks and balls and farts in a way that I suppose is meant to be ironic, and then it brings the action to a screeching halt to pretend as though there's an emotional core that the player ought to be invested in. There's a lady here whose entire raison d'etre is that she's hot and she swears. Your co-op buddy is pulled back from the brink of becoming a remorseless killing machine with a teary "I love you, man" monologue and then a power door fails to open because it got the Xbox 360 red ring of death. It ultimately doesn't work, and the game ends with him saying "God...is...dead." to show that he's truly become the Joker. Roll credits, we're ending on a cliffhanger. Buy the new version for forty dollars to play as Duke Nukem, just in case you thought this wasn't a contender for Epic's most creatively bankrupt product.

The first of many, many falls from grace for People Can Fly. It's sad to see the creative team behind Painkiller — a game which isn't outstanding, but is certainly still good — lower themselves to this, both mechanically and narratively. I know they're capable of doing better, but they just can't seem to rekindle their very first spark. It's a shame.

Games for Windows Live died and made it so I couldn't play this game on PC anymore. It's the first time I've ever been glad to have someone steal from me.

Has the potential to be one of the greatest fighting games ever made.

There was once a time where I was excited to see the Capcom logo when I started up a game. There was a time after that when seeing that logo filled me with dread. There’s a time right now where it excites me again. Let’s hope this isn’t cyclical.

Street Fighter 6 is easily one of the most beginner-friendly fighting games I’ve ever seen, filled to bursting with dozens upon dozens of quality of life tools to help newbies get both into the genre and into the lab. A lot of scrub quotes have come out in the wake of the addition of modern controls from those horrified at the thought of fighting games having higher skill floors, but a bad player on modern will still get absolutely worked by a mediocre player on classic. Auto combos and Smash Bros. special inputs can only carry you so far; this is still Street Fighter, the game of grounded neutral and footsies, and you will learn your fundamentals or be bodied.

Fortunately, it’s never been easier to start the learning process. Training mode allows you to see inputs, frame data, activate preset CPU behaviors, find out when you’re actionable, tweak values, parameters and game logic to your heart’s content; perhaps this is a bit less impressive in an era where feature-rich labs are more common than they were a generation ago, but this is a stacked selection. You won’t be left wanting for much besides visible hit and hurt boxes — an obvious miss by Capcom, all things considered — and near-seamless character transitions from the pause menu can get you practicing as or against someone new without even backing out from the lab.

World Tour mode has remained a somewhat surprising draw, though perhaps it shouldn’t be too shocking; there are going to be a lot of people who are only interested in playing this with their friends, and the game may as well not exist for them if there’s nothing else to keep their attention when said friends aren’t around. Getting to sprint around Metro City and interacting with all of the masters is fun. Texting Ryu or fumbling Juri is as goofy as it is entertaining, as is the inherent ridiculousness of literally almost every single person who walks down the street being ready and willing to start throwing elbows so long as you ask. You can also sucker punch them to deal extra damage before the fight even begins. This makes you a scumbag, but scumbag tactics work well enough. It’s fairly grindy if you’re aiming to see most of the content and max out your relationship levels with your mentors, but most players probably won’t run into this wall before they wrap up their playthrough.

The experience is marred by a few tiny dents that still need to be banged out. Online ranked matchmaking is complete and utter garbage; if you get lucky and do too well in your placement matches, you’ll get ranked far above where you’re actually meant to be. Normally, this wouldn’t be much a problem, as losing matches will make you lose LP, decreasing your rank. The core issue is that you can’t drop below the division that you were placed in, presumably as an effort to stop smurfs from deranking and stomping noobs. My Manon got placed in the Gold bracket. I am not good enough to be in Gold. All I can do now is lose set after set against players far better than I am with virtually no recourse, as I am outright not allowed to drop down to the bracket I ought to be in unless I play a completely different character. The current implementation of ELO needs to change. I can’t seriously imagine that there are enough intentionally deranking players out there racking up double perfect K.O.s against Modern Ryus to justify not letting anyone fall below their placement division.

Additional minor complaints are that the input system oscillates a little inconsistently between “too tight” and “way too lenient”; some of the example combos will eat your motions if you perform them before you’re fully actionable, while characters like Zangief can reliably throw out a launcher into air grab by churning half-circles instead of 360s. Also, the inclusion of the omitted-from-pre-release-coverage battle pass and time-limited microtransaction cosmetics fucking suck for a game that’s already $70 with at least three DLC seasons to come. They’re inconsequential enough, luckily, but Capcom is going whaling in a game that’s priced at a premium to begin with. I’m hoping that the content that’s going to be locked behind even more paywalls is going to be pretty limited and uninteresting, but I’m not exactly optimistic about it.

The foundation here is rock-solid, and the trajectory it takes from here is going to determine whether Street Fighter 6 can truly cement itself within the canon of the greatest games of all time, or just remain a really good entry in a series that already has a few of those under its belt.

JP is going to win the Capcom Cup.